I only mention this to single out their phone support during the 90-day period as top-notch. DRI kindly replaced this without any trouble, and you can simply swap a disk pack between two units and you're back in business. One unit was simply a dud - it would stall for up to a minute during copies, then spring back to life - strangest failure mode I've ever seen. While the concept is excellent - dead-simple expandable storage, it's turned out very differently than I expected. I finally bought a Drobo FS late last year (on a decent sale - $550). I also had the proper network in place - I wired my house for Cat6/GigE a long time ago. I had several terabytes of storage, but spread across a few noisy direct-attach disk arrays, no redundancy, and generally slow/IDE to boot. I'm very much the target market for the Drobo FS. If mods think it's more appropriate later on, I'll save it.) (This *may* be more applicable to the second part of this review, but as I'm not sure I'll go ahead and post here. My WHS is only about a year old, so unlike Lee I have plenty of time to wait and see if the Vail addon makers can write a viable drive extender replacement (or MS adds it back in a service pack), how Drobo shakes out over the long haul, and if FreeNas's developers manage to create an easy button for ZFS storage pools. A large number of drive bays is much easier to get at the mATX level but then you're looking at something in the same size class as a desktop PC. A from scratch DIY box will be much cheaper even if you use all new parts, but a SFF case with a comparable number of drive bays will be significantly larger (the only candidate mITX case I found on newegg was a Lian-Li with space for 6 drives and twice the volume of the 4bay HP box). A bit of googling indicates HPs entry level 4bay WHS box with a single 1GB drive goes for ~$700 new, so the price gap isn't that large. LVM+MDADM is loads cheaper, even if not quite as convenient.Ī backup system without any hard drives ought to cost less than my desktop.Ī lot depends if you're comparing drobo with a DIY box, or a prebuilt WHS box. These things are kind of expensive for what they are.Īt first I was sitting here thinking what a cool product, but the empty 5 bay one is $700. It's not indexed, rarely searched, and expected to have gobs of available space. I could easily see a pair of large drobos providing inexpensive online archive space for Exchange servers. The VMware certification program's reputation is worth nothing if they certify this unit.ĭata Robotics is continue to move into more disk units, a 12 disk is now available. The latest firmware has allowed it to run more than six Vm's without locking up like a WinMe laptop, but still the disk latency and throughput are abysmal. Ready for VMware ESX servers' high I/O while still being brain-dead simple. Knowing that I can upgrade it from 500GB to 3TB hard drives in the future make it a decent long term on-line archive point for data that is not useful enough to live in the SAN but needs to be available, not just dumped to offsite tape. The Pro is a pokey eight disk beast with a ridiculous amount of potential storage. With a good eSATA card, it's a perfect high speed drive. The S is connected via an e-SATA connection and is really fast for a desktop drive. Each with a full load of 500GB 7.2kRPM SATA drives.
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